


read my mind

by germanic



Category: Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because this was the relationship I expected in that series., F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 18:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12636294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/germanic/pseuds/germanic
Summary: A shameless little "fix it" fic where Bardan Jusik and Parja Bralor end up together.





	read my mind

**Author's Note:**

> When I read Republic Commando, I was surprised when Parja and Fi ended up together, as I partially anticipated it being Jusik. I had read the later books (post-Return of the Jedi) where we met Jusik and he talked about being married before I read the Republic Commando series so, naturally, I assumed that the introduction of Parja was the introduction of his future wife. And, to be honest, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't Parja so I wrote a little "fix it" story for a ship which is a lonely little ship.
> 
> I will probably write more for this ship, but for now, there's this.

Bardan Jusik needed more guidance than could be found in ruminations about old teachings and recalled pearls of wisdom that Kal Skirata had spouted along the way. He found himself—both physically and metaphorically, although it was intended metaphorically—torn between two worlds and the longer the process carried on, the more difficult he found it to get a familiarity with either.

 

And he blamed the war.

 

Before the war, he had been a Jedi struggling towards upholding ideals. He had strived to be what the masters wanted, taking their words to heart and making them his personal creeds. But, then there was the war, the soldiers who accompanied it, and the sergeant that followed them. Perhaps, he’d thought during a particularly long trip, it was Kal Skirata who’d been his problem.

 

Skirata had been the one who’d called him Bard’ika, who’d made him feel like one of a pack of adult children who weren’t to blame for anything. They were good boys all carrying out orders and doing what they were supposed to. In Skirata, he’d found a warmth he’d never knew he wanted. It seeped into the part of his heart where parents’ love should have been and the affection of doting Jedi Masters had never reached. He became like the soldiers then, willing to do anything for Skirata.

 

Healing Fi had been his contribution. He’d reached into Jedi ideals and lessons and carried them to the mission of a man who was nothing like a Jedi. He’d said it was a Jedi-like thing to do, helping those who needed it, but he knew he was losing his way. It’d been the most obvious step, the one where he became more than just a general and where he had broken rules for the man who stood in for a father.

 

Jusik had tried vainly to grasp back at his Jedi roots and justify himself when he traveled to Mandalore the first time. Was he not doing exactly what Jedi principles asked for in this moment? He was helping the ones who needed it the most, healing the ones who had been given up on. He was using his talent—his gift, even—for a purpose that was pure.

 

He was clawing his way back to being a Jedi, a good one like Masters Yoda and Windu wanted, when he’d been tossed from the cliff.

 

Parja Bralor was a rare presence in the beginning. In the hours when it was him and Mij Gilamar at Fi’s bedside, she’d taken her leave to finish chores up around Kyrimorut or go back to Enceri. She was someone he’d come to know better from questions asked of Gilamar because Skirata never seemed to have the time or willingness to answer anything about the strange woman that he had blindly agreed to letting care over Fi. But when Gilamar stopped coming as often and she stopped leaving, he found himself having to actually speak to her.

 

And he found himself befriending her when she seemed to be easy-going enough. He could forgive her for being an engineer in trade and masquerading as a nurse when she didn’t hold it against him that he was a Jedi. They laughed and talked over cups of caf brewed at five in the morning when she woke early for work and he to leave. He told stories about the Temple and she about a clan—he found he could lose himself in jealousy at her stories of a family so tight knit.

 

It went on for five months: traveling between worlds, straying further away from his Jedi upbringing as he embraced the Mandalorian lifestyle that Kal had suggested and she lived—and let him live. Five months of them talking at odd hours, of sharing meals with her and Fi, of prompting Fi, of encouraging him, of him sleeping on the couch more nights than not and her putting a blanket over him.

 

He was still a Jedi then. It was the only life he had been prepared for and the only thing that he had to his name. While he’d worn armor and pretended to be one of Kal’s boys, it still was never quite the same. It was never that real—

 

But it felt real when Fi was a little more capable of going places, when she would take him and invite Jusik along. They’d walk on either side of Fi and she’d tell everything she knew about the world and city to them. It was directed to Fi, he knew, but he took it to heart just as much as Fi. He’d wanted the world that Skirata talked about, that she knew, and he memorized every word she said about Mandalore, took in the culture she gave them, and accidentally fell in love along the way.

 

In those months when they’d talked late at night, shoulder to shoulder on the couch, they’d fallen asleep against each other before. She would always wake first, covering him with a blanket that he’d find in the morning. It was like that until it wasn’t and he had his arms around her while she slept against his shoulder.

 

He had found the morning painfully awkward, unsure of what to tell her, while she smiled the same way she had every time before and gave him something to eat for the journey back to Coruscant. And it was there that he found himself needing guidance.

 

The Jedi did not teach about romantic relationships. They did not prepare someone to fall in love and think of it in a positive light. It was, to paraphrase the great Jedi Masters, a complex attachment that made someone do stupid things.

 

Kal Skirata had spoken a bit about love and romance, although it was usually about the complexity of women. And, of course, Jusik was terrified to ask questions of the man who was friend to the aunt of the girl that he may or may not have been besotted with. Because he was sure that Skirata would tell Rav Bralor and he did not need to bring about Bralor’s wrath down upon his head. While he knew Skirata’s love as a dutiful Jedi and a wayward Jedi, he wasn’t sure he would receive the same affection from Bralor as a potential suitor for her niece or from any of her family for that matter.

 

And so it was in airspace, alone with his thoughts, that Jusik tried to understand himself and what exactly he felt for Parja.

 

It was easier to start with himself.

 

He was not a Jedi, that much was painfully clear after months of being enthralled with stories about Mandalore and craving an affiliation with a family that was as strong as Parja’s. He still had one foot in the life of a Jedi, but it wasn’t for the right reasons—he no longer cared about the entire galaxy, but his pseudo-family. He maintained bits of their morals and creeds, but not enough. If he went back now, he’d rebel and be marked as another lost one because he couldn’t understand taking children from their families and teaching them that they were so different and everything was so wrong—

 

He had, after all, tasted what they called sin and found it good.

 

But he wasn’t a Mandalorian. He did not have a suit of armor that told his story like Parja did—or any of them for that matter—and he did not have a clan there. He was an impostor roaming in borrowed armor and repeating the stories of a native.

 

He was, then, a man living by butchered Jedi creeds who wanted to be a Mandalorian warrior, but didn’t know where to start.

 

And what was Parja to him?

 

If he was a Jedi, she was a friend and trusted ally. If he was a Mandalorian, she was a prospective romance. But for the man straddling two worlds, she was a friend that he wanted to mean more to. He would have liked her to feel the same and imagined that he did—she had, after all, slept against him undisturbed. He wanted to try kissing her, broach areas of romance with her, and test exactly how stupid love made him—he made a note to approach the subject with Etain, figuring that she would understand at least a little.

 

The thought rattled around in his head while he worked, his thoughts wrapped tightly around Mandalore and Parja. He tried, gingerly, to touch topics of culture with Skirata and, out of desperation, Vau, but little came of it. He never knew how to ask the right questions or didn’t tell enough to let them know how to respond. If anything, it made him further conflicted.

 

They had a loyalty to the culture that was not their own by birth and it inspired in him a sense of guilt. He had been bestowed the culture of a Jedi and he should have been more loyal to it, loyal like them, but instead he wasn’t and was breaking the rules one by one without a care.

 

He returned to Mandalore like this, conflict raging in his head and heart, and when Parja met him at the door he had a thousand questions: 

 

Do you like me? Do you love me? What did that night mean to you? Am I over-reading this? Do you know what I should do?

 

And, in that same way she had with Fi, where she just knew what to do or say, she kissed him, smiling. The war he had felt fell apart in a second.

 

He stopped being a Jedi then, bringing only his lightsaber with him. There would be, he decided, no dawdling halfway. Jusik was a man of conviction before and he would still be only with a new creed. The devotion he had desperately kept alight for the Jedi shifted fully to the Mandalorians and Parja.

 

He touched her hand more, happy to take it in his own, and accepted her invitation to sleep in her bed. He made the borrowed armor his own, cut his hair and shaved his beard, making himself into a Mandalorian warrior. He did everything to make himself a suitable match for her, to make her family pleased when he confessed his intentions and that, although it was incomplete, he had a plan. He’d marry Parja and they would raise a family. He would break every last tie with the order and live on Mandalore. He would vow to protect their children from the Jedi, keeping them close rather than handing them over, no matter what it took.

 

It was the plan he had created with Parja over late night caf when neither of them could sleep. He had proposed it tentatively and, aside from her laughing about where he would ask someone for permission to marry her, she had agreed. He’d kissed her when she agreed—something else that he was improving at with her help.

 

But in war, plans were meant to be broken.

 

Jusik saw the temple burn, saw Etain die, saw Darman lost, saw Niner lost, and saw his plan fall away. He hid in the hanger for a time being with the girl he had been so ready to tell _Kal’buir_ was his _fiancé_ , holding tightly onto her hands while she watched him with solemn blue eyes. Before he left to find Skirata, he kissed her, debating if he should marry her right then. Life seemed so fleeting at the moment, but he wanted everything to stay as it had been in his mind the nights before.

 

His plan, however, seemed to only unravel further. While he tried to introduce Kad to the Force, he thought about the children he had dreamed up when Parja was in his arms. They’d had his sandy hair, but always her eyes. Sometimes it had been sons, other times daughters, and occasionally it was a mix. He would teach them to use the Force and would never let them feel unloved—

 

But as Kad sat in his arms, a suddenly silent child, he knew there were far worse things in the galaxy than Jedi Masters coming for a Force-sensitive child. There were people who wanted them dead and burned, erased from the galaxy,  Suddenly, dread sat like a stone in his stomach at the thought of Kad’s future, of those of the children he’d dreamed up and given proper Mandalorian names.

 

He told Parja this the night of Etain’s funeral. It had mingled further during the course of the day; the fear for his own children joined with a fear for her safety. “Maybe you shouldn’t marry me,” became the final statement in his explanation.

 

She had sat up then and met his gaze. “I love you and don’t care whatever difficulties that brings with it.”

 

“But—”

 

“I knew you would be trouble when we met, knew you would be trouble when we kissed, when you proposed, and I didn’t care because I’m willing to face those problems that you’re so sure of with you. I will gladly go through all the trouble to be with you because I love you and I enjoy being around you. However, it’s another matter entirely if you don’t love me anymore—”

 

“No.”

 

“No, what?”

 

“I still love you.”

 

“Then trust that,” she said, smiling the way she did now only for him. “Trust _us_.”

 

Jusik made a new plan then.

 

He waited two weeks after Etain’s funeral before he asked her properly.

 

In the evening as they got ready for bed, he asked her if she might like to marry him, quickly clarifying that he meant it as a question of when not if. She had laughed and he had regretted his question in that moment. However, she had stepped over to meet him, taking his hands to stop him from wringing them. “Well, when the time is right, we’ll stand like this and make our vows.”

 

“How does that go again?”

 

“ _Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde_.” She smiled, running her thumb over his knuckles. “Say it with me.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Practice makes perfect.”

 

Jusik followed her lead, stumbling the first two times and having to stay a little behind so that he didn’t miss a word. The third time, with confidence, he kept time with her and when they’d finished, she kissed him.

 

The wide smile was still there, tugging at the corners of her mouth. “And now there’s no need to worry about it at all.”

 

He stared at her. “Did we just—?”

 

“Yes. Because you overthink things and I would prefer that you didn’t just this once.”


End file.
